For example, the idea of “data ownership” is often championed as a solution. But what is the point of owning data that should not exist in the first place? All that does is further institutionalise and legitimate data capture. It’s like negotiating how many hours a day a seven-year-old should be allowed to work, rather than contesting the fundamental legitimacy of child labour. Data ownership also fails to reckon with the realities of behavioural surplus. Surveillance capitalists extract predictive value from the exclamation points in your post, not merely the content of what you write, or from how you walk and not merely where you walk. Users might get “ownership” of the data that they give to surveillance capitalists in the first place, but they will not get ownership of the surplus or the predictions gleaned from it – not without new legal concepts built on an understanding of these operations.

The real purpose of digital capitalism is to extract value from the economy and deliver it to those at the top. If consumers find a way to retain some of that value for themselves, the thinking goes, you’re doing something wrong or “leaving money on the table.”

The city is a symbol of outward-looking cosmopolitanism – a potent answer to the homogeneity and insularity of the nation state. Today it is the only place where the idea of exerting meaningful democratic control over one’s life, however trivial the problem, is still viable.

From transport to food delivery, from accommodation to energy consumption, the city also figures prominently in how digital technologies penetrate our life. That the city is also the primary target of big tech is no accident: if these firms succeed in controlling its infrastructure, they need not worry about much else.

The true challenge for the data distributist left is, thus, to find a way to distribute power, not just data. It must mobilise the nation state to turn cities into the harbingers of a new, radical democracy keen on deploying socialised big data and artificial intelligence in the interests of citizens. Without such an emphasis on radical empowerment, the data distributism of the left will only be a boon to the loony far right.

We face three political options. We can continue with the current model, with Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon and others taking over more and more functions of the state. With time, perhaps, we won’t need to worry that their technologies are used to influence elections because most of our lives will depend on what happens in their boardrooms – not on what happens in our parliaments.

Alternatively, we can opt for the kind of pseudo-antiglobalism endorsed by Bannon, reclaiming some autonomy from the tech giants by over-empowering the financial sector (which Bannon, of course, also wants to tame with cryptocurrencies; we’ll see who will tame whom, but so far banks seem to have survived – and even swallowed – their challengers).

Finally, we can use the recent data controversies to articulate a truly decentralised, emancipatory politics, whereby the institutions of the state (from the national to the municipal level) will be deployed to recognise, create, and foster the creation of social rights to data. These institutions will organise various data sets into pools with differentiated access conditions. They will also ensure that those with good ideas that have little commercial viability but promise major social impact would receive venture funding and realise those ideas on top of those data pools.

Rethinking many of the existing institutions in which citizens seem to have lost trust along such lines would go a long way towards addressing the profound sense of alienation from public and political life felt across the globe. It won’t be easy but it can still be done. This, however, might not be the case 10 or even five years from now, as the long-term political and economic costs of data extractivism come to the surface. The data wells inside ourselves, like all those other drilling sites, won’t last for ever either.

"The sharing model is in its infancy, and there are plenty of me-too businesses trying to make it work in other sectors (cars, bikes, high-end cameras, etc). And, beyond the issues of consent – as in Barcelona – it poses two challenges. First, however brilliant these new models are, they cannot produce exponential growth. It is technology in the service of squeezing out the final drops of value from something, rather than infinite expansion.

Second, who owns the upside? Once the platforms to rent out things, services or time are stable, textbook economics states that the cost of using them should fall. So, what if you applied the sharing principle without seeking a profit at all? What if these very platforms could be taken over by society and repurposed so that all the benefit went to the consumer or to society itself? The socialists of the early 20th century eyed monopolies like Vail’s with optimism: take them over and their highly organised and unitary status means you can use them to run the economy. Today, if you wanted to re-order the economy to deliver participation and choice alongside social justice, it’s the sharing models you would start from."

"At some point in the summer and fall of 2013 I started paying attention to the growing commodification of personal data. Basically, now that everything is in one way or another mediated by Silicon Valley—all these smart beds and smart cars and smart everything—it’s possible to capture and monetize every moment we spend awake (and, it seems, also asleep). So we are all invited to become data entrepreneurs curating our data portfolios. Analytically, of course, this ‘datafication’ of everything is an extension of the much broader phenomenon of the financialization of everyday life. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why this is happening and how it can be stopped and it became obvious to me that the answers to these questions had far more to do with politics than with technology. I also realized that I could continue coming up with alternative policy proposals all I wanted, but they still wouldn’t be accepted, for structural reasons. The reason why Europe has such a hard time formulating an alternative project to Silicon Valley has little to do with any lack of knowledge or skills in Europe. It’s just that the kind of interventions that would have to be made—lessening dependence on American companies, promoting initiatives that do not default to competitiveness and entrepreneurship, finding money to invest in infrastructure that would favour the interests of citizens—go clean against what the neoliberal Europe of today stands for. Not to mention the way in which lobbyists representing big technology companies dominate the debate in Brussels. In other words, to understand Europe’s dealings with ‘the Internet’ we are far better off historicizing Europe rather than ‘the Internet’. Once I had done some work on the most elementary, perhaps even superficial level—for example, by looking at the evolution of antitrust and competition law in Europe, or the dissemination of various ideas that used to be associated with the Third Way under the innocent-sounding label of ‘social innovation’—I found it very hard not to question my own social democratic complacency."

"Sharing companies do nothing to facilitate that sort of interaction; indeed they thrive by doing the opposite. (Authenticity marketing does the same thing; it precludes the possibility of authenticity by co-opting it.) They subsume more types of interaction and exchange to market structures. They are popular because they do what brand communities do: They allow people to extract value from strangers without the hassle of having to dealing with them directly. Sharing companies and brand communities mediate social relations and make them seem less risky. Actual community is full of friction and unresolvable competing agendas; sharing apps’ main function is to eradicate friction and render all parties’ agenda uniform: let’s make a deal.

When sharing companies celebrate the idea of community, they mean brand community. And if they appropriate rhetoric about breaking down the attachment to owning goods as a means of signifying identity and inclusion, it’s certainly not because they care about abolishing personal property, or pride in it. It’s because they are trying to sell their brand as an alternative to the bother of actually having to come up with a real alternative to product-based personal identity."

"However misguided he was in other respects, Hayek understood that building a market society involved breaking with many of the traditions and practices of the past. Thatcher, on the other hand, wanted to revive British life as it was, or could be imagined as having been, in the 1930s or 1950s: a country ruled by values of family, patriotism and public service. But the stolid, dutiful Britain for which she was so nostalgic was not a creation of the market – in fact, at least in part, it was an inheritance of postwar Labour collectivism. The irony of Thatcher's career is that the process she set in motion has erased forever the past to which she dreamed of returning."

"By moving from a system where public services are supported by progressive general taxation to a system where they are supported exclusively by the flat fees people pay to use them, they move from a system where the rich are obliged to help the poor to a system where the less well-off enable services that the rich get for what is, to them, a trifling sum. The commodity that makes water and power cables and airports valuable to an investor, foreign or otherwise, is the people who have no choice but to use them. We have no choice but to pay the price the toll-keepers charge. We are a human revenue stream; we are being made tenants in our own land, defined by the string of private fees we pay to exist here."